How tough is it today to put your book on Smashwords?

I uploaded my second book to Smashwords recently, so I thought I’d give a report on how well that process went. Here’s the summary:

It’s about as slick as greased glass.

OK, if you are as anal as I am, you sweat the small stuff. In my case, I took between 3 to 4 hours to get the book content ’just so,’ which is not to say that the process calls for grueling, painstaking steps that you must grind through that whole time. Not at all.

You see, I’m a bit of a perfectionist (the nice way to refer to someone who’s anal). I want my product to be spiffy and top notch. I don’t want errors or inconsistencies, no matter how slight. I want it to shine. Which takes time. It takes checking and rechecking. It takes grumbling over how a paragraph looks or how a story intro meshes with the opening sentence. It takes tweaking the layout and adjusting the overall flow. It takes imagining yourself as a reader holding a Kobo, Kindle or Nook.

This is the responsibility and work of a publisher. In the case of Smashwords, that’s you. You make the decisions on how it should look and feel. Once you’re happy, you push it to market. But it doesn’t end there. You can go back anytime and make changes, add content, improve the product. You are the publisher. You decide how it will be. The power rests in your hands.

So that’s all fine and good, but... getting back to the Smashwords process... just how tough it is these days?

If you have your document polished, your cover art image ready, and you can follow some step-by-step editing guidelines, you can do it in 2 – 3 hours. No sweat. Smashwords provides aspiring authors a decent instruction set that takes you through the process, including what gotchas to beware of and what to do when things don’t go as well as they should. In short, this is a process that demands attention to detail, but don’t let that scare you. This is not rocket science or black art. You can do it. Honestly, if you just don’t want to be bothered with the effort, you can even hire someone to tackle this, possibly for as little as $50. Bottom-line: if you’ve got a book ready to go, you should press on and do it.

Just a couple of brief observations:

1. Be sure you have your book cover ready to go. Smashwords just upped their requirements on the image dimensions. It now should be no less than 1,400 pixels wide, ideally a bit larger. The height should end up being a multiple of the width by like 1.3 or 1.4. This is considerably larger than the old requirements they’ve used.
2. Before diving into the Smashwords Style Guide process steps, take the time to refine your manuscript file to make it as polished as you can. Once you start the publishing process steps, you won’t want to be detouring to deal with beefing up your manuscript format, not if you can avoid it.
3. Check out the Smashwords publish web page and especially review the meta data you’ll need to provide at the time you upload and publish your book. I recommend you think about each of the inputs and prepare your information in advance, ready to cut-and-paste into the fields on the Smashwords web page. That approach is a lot better than waiting until the moment you publish your book’s file and rushing through entering the meta data. It matters. Think like a publisher would, because that’s you.

If you’re sitting on the fence about publishing via Smashwords, I hoped I’ve convinced you to take the plunge. With a little effort on your part, you can be selling your book in just a few hours.

Good luck!

Slow Blogging Writer

I'm a slow blogger.

Duh, you say. A quick peek at my blog post calendar reveals that big secret.

I suppose I should have said that I've made a conscious decision as a writer not to spew forth volumes of word-spray across the various social media streams one is supposed to use to reach one's audience and fans. It's all summed up nicely by Anne R. Allen in this blog post.

Which flies in the face of plenty of tribal advice urging authors to post more, not less. After all, more content pushed by an author equals more chances to make impressions, more prospective readers to touch with at least one post / one thread, more of your noise drowning out the surrounding din. Hopefully.

It's folly though.

Think about it. In a connected world chock full of endless streams of infotainment of all stripes, do you find yourself craving even more variety, more ways to fritter away one of the most precious commodities you have: your time? I don't. I have too many already.

So I heartily agree with Anne R. Allen's points regarding slow blogging. She's spot-on and makes a strong case.

I'm going to add my own spin though, invoking something that's the bane of every entertainer. Most in the business try hard to connect with their audience, drawing an emotional reaction from them, informing them, challenging them, amusing them, or generally touching them in some tangible way. An entertainer tries to never, ever bore the audience though. That's the kiss of death.

This, then, is what worries me regarding pounding my thoughts out through social media channels. The harder and more frequently I do so, the faster my decent into the pit of boredom and irrelevance.

Brrrr. What a terrible thought.

I'll stick with slow blogging.

Busted by Amazon Price Match!

The Kindle store policy is: competing venues cannot undercut Amazon on price. If a lower price gets posted, Amazon will eventually detect it (or someone narcs about it) and then they'll price match on the Kindle store. 

Some authors actually exploit this policy to get Amazon to drop the price of their Kindle book below the minimum allowed. As in, making it free, which an author can't do when they upload and price their book; free is not allowed. I didn't intentionally pursue this, but I figured it was bound to happen.

About a year ago, I posted a version of Game Over on the Kindle store. This was a special edition I intended just for Kindle owners in that I added another scene amounting to 2,000 additional words. I labeled it an Extended Edition and put a 99 cent price on it. Over on Smashwords, I had the original, shorter version of Game Over for sale at no charge. I was thinking I might get a month or two before Amazon price matching kicked in. It ended up being 10 months, and no, I didn't assist the process.

But there are a healthy number of Kindle owners taking advantage of the $0.00 price since it changed last month.

I'm good with that.

Good news on a story

But I'm going to be one of those mean bloggers and not reveal any details just yet. Don't you hate it when writers do that? Grrr.

What I can say about it is... I stepped somewhat out of the box. I had an interest in writing a certain type of story, set my mind to it and then did it. It was a good exercise of my creative mental muscle and I could have left it at that: an thought experiment not intended for further pursuit.

Except that I couldn't leave it alone.

I put the story through the honing and polish process, liked the final result and submitted it to a choice market. By now you've guessed that it got accepted, which thrills me to no end. It also raises some tough new questions for me and I'll have to expand on that when I finally reveal all the details.

So the point of this post is not really to tease you, just to encourage you to step out of your cozy writer's box every now and then. It's part of your overall journey and who knows what new destinations it could open up.

Not renewing KDP Select

In mid-March Dark Doses finishes its first 90 days being offered exclusively via Amazon's KDP Select program. The results have been less than spectacular. Thus I won't be renewing it and will release the book to other venues like Smashwords.

I think KDP Select can be useful, particularly for authors who have a portfolio of books and they want to set aside 1 or 2 as magnets to draw readers to the others. Here's an example. Say you have a 5-novel series for sale. You could enroll just the first one in KDP Select as a way to hook and draw readers to the rest of them. Or you could write 2 or 3 short stories or novelettes as tie-ins and put those shorter works into KDP Select while keeping the novels out.

Beyond that, I'm not seeing much value for the everyday author.

The 'borrow' feature for Amazon Prime customers, while interesting sounding, seems to me to work best for books more in high demand. Not many folks would want to burn their limited borrowing opportunities on lower profile or unknown books. So the bonus bucks Amazon credits to KDP Select authors for borrows is fairly constrained, though Amazon likes to make noise about the monthly budgets allocated to borrows.

Finally a thought on the 'make available for free' feature. There are beaucoup processes and web tools now that enable Kindle owners to soak up the tidal waves of KDP Select freebies. It's a slick arrangement for Kindle owners. Without risk or outlay, you can grab 100 stories in a day, scan the first 3 pages of each, and discard all but the top 3 that you feel are worth reading start-to-finish. By the end of a week, you've crunched 700 books down to 21 that are locked into your To-Be-Read list... all without spending a dime. You can literally keep that up until your Kindle cries: "Uncle!"

What does the KDP Select author have to look forward to in this? A shot at discovery. Perhaps a Like or a meaningful review. If you're fortunate, your book just might catch-on via chatter in social media circles or from a high-traffic blogger's comments. But I would not recommend holding your breath for any of that.

I don't regret the experiment. It was worth a shot. When the 800-pound gorilla gives you a way to rearrange the bananas, you have to see if you just scored a banana bonanza out of the deal. In the case of KDP Select... not so much.

To Soar Free is now live on the Kindle store

To Soar Free is a short story of about 7,000 words. It originally appeared in The Lorelei Signal back in 2010. You can still find it there along with a number of delightful stories that emphasize female protagonists and feminine themes.

I have to give two shout outs regarding the work that went into making To Soar Free available as an e-book.

Firstly, this is the second time I've published an e-book under the guidance and tutelage of Paul Salvette. Paul's web site has numerous helpful articles that aid an author with the whole production effort required for a well-polished e-book. Browse his articles for in-depth, step-by-step instructions or, better yet, buy Paul's guide book that brings it all together. Available for Kindle, on B&N and on Smashwords.

Secondly, the delightful, intriguing cover art for To Soar Free was crafted by Robin Nuttall. This is the second cover she's made for me and I really enjoy working with her. You can find out more about her services and view samples of her work on her web site. 

Time to release another e-book

So far I've e-published one short story and a collection of short stories as different e-books. It's time for a new addition. I'm going to publish a second short story as a standalone e-book, which will make two from the collection available for readers to try out solo.

Why bother with this?

Numbers.

Besides needing a name (brand), presence (web site, blog, facebook page, twitter account, etc.), push (marketing, promotions) and pulls (reviews, likes, links), an author needs product.

Well duh, you say. The more you have to sell, the greater the chance you will sell.

Very true.

But besides giving current fans more of your goodies to enjoy, having a larger number of released books provides more ways for potential fans to discover you. Each book is like a beacon, drawing wayward readers in to check it out. When they find one, they find them all. This provides more temptations to consider, which might help make the difference when a reader is unsure about a newly discovered author.

Plus I can use the standalone short stories not just as lures but also as promotions for Dark Doses, my short story collection. For instance, I can give away the standalone stories more frequently than the whole collection. This matters particularly now because I'm thinking about dropping Dark Doses out of KDP Select. But that will be another post for the future.

Funny thing, publishing. It starts with words and it pretty much ends with numbers.